Page 157 of The Pirate Queen

Another heavy thump at the door. Then a pounding.

“Gráinne! We need you!”

It’s Gutty. He doesn’t know the turn her body has taken today. None of them knew until Finn found her a short while ago. The crew thinks only that she has taken the day to rest after her shift at the helm last night.

She can hear more of her men’s voices now. They are overwhelmed.

The thing that she has always hated most about giving birth is the violent betrayal of her body afterward. The shaking. The jaw-rattling tremors that move through her from head to foot after the shock of expelling a human into the world. She can hardly get to the edge of her bed. But when she does, a steady stream of blood runs down her leg.

“I am so sorry, Tibbot,” she whispers, then bends over to kiss his angry face. “I will be right back.”

He hears her voice and quiets. His eyes open, search for her. Already they are a startling hawklike blue.

Grace feels loose and undone. Like her torso is in the cabin but her legs are far away on deck. Her muscles molten. Uncooperative. But still, she forces herself up and onto her feet. She forces herself away from her son.

So different from her other births, when she lay abed for hours afterward, tended by servants.

Grace takes the dagger in her left hand and the blunderbuss in her right. Two steps get her to the wall, where she leans her shoulder against the rough wood to support her own weight.

She drags herself to the door.

Lifts the latch.

Pulls the cabin door open.

There are spots before her eyes, but not enough to hide the bloody bedlam on deck.

Gutty and the Murray twins move like lethal ghosts across the ship, fighting, stabbing, swinging. Ultan has abandoned the cabin deck to fight. No point trying to steer the ship when it’s lashed to the strange Algerian galley. The ship is long and pointy, like a Turkish blade.

There are bodies everywhere.

Her men fight and claw and slash against the corsairs. They are olive-skinned and bearded. Turbaned. Sashed. A strange kind of half shoe that curls up at the toes. Tunics that only reach their knees. Wicked curved blades. Their captain is older than Grace, and his beard falls in a point to the center of his chest. But it has gone gray at the corners of his mouth, with two long streaks of silver that resemble tusks. He is flanked by officers of his own, all of them fighting back-to-back in a huddle.

She wobbles.

Blinks the spots out of her eyes.

The dagger is heavy, the blunderbuss more so. But still, she raises them to shoulder height.

“This is my fecking ship!” Grace screams, and it is as though she has thrown a cat into a henhouse. The men startle, then freeze.

The Algerian captain sees her standing in the door at the same time as everyone else. And what a fright she must be. A bloody woman in a sheer leine, holding two weapons and screaming at the top of her lungs. She can feel that her hair has come loose from her braid, thrown into the wind, blowing wild around her face.

She can see the disbelief, the disdain, in the other captain’s face. He sees only a woman, and a wounded, near-naked one at that. He opens his mouth to laugh.

Grace pulls the trigger.

A roar fills the air and her arm jerks skyward so hard that the blunderbuss slams into the wall behind her. A deep painful shudder rattles down her arm. All she knows before she opens her eyes is that her fingers are numb and her ears feel as if they are filled with water.

No small pistol, this. No small single shot. The short flared barrel is loaded with nearly twenty lead fragments, each of them almost half an inch in diameter. She is only eight feet from him, so close that his head disintegrates in a plume of gore. Face, skull, brain—all of it gone. It is deeply unpleasant, startling to watch. Violent. Disgusting, even. But Grace is so damn tired that she cannot be bothered to react as his body drops to the deck with a wet thump. The officers he’s been huddled with are all hit to varying degrees. Eyes. Chins. Hands they’ve thrown up to block the blast.

That captain’s men scatter. And her men seize the opportunity. They go on the offensive. Cut and slash, kick and punch. Tackle. In a wave, they drive the corsairs back toward the starboard gunwale.

Grace hears her baby crying in the cabin.

What a horrible thing to be shoved into such a bright, cold, loud world, then to be left naked on a bed, abandoned, instead of put to a soft warm breast. This new child of hers is only moments old, but Grace has already failed him.

Her head swims.